Welcome to "hit the pages." The purpose of this Blog is to provide a voice and a forum to literacy teachers, members of one of the most difficult sects of an already very difficult (but rewarding) profession.
I first began my journey as a literacy teacher seven years ago at a small middle school in Washington Heights called the Minerva Mirabal School for Law and Journalism, teaching 8th grade English Language Arts. I was terrible. Aside from some very serious mindset issues and difficulties managing the behavior in the classroom, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing instructionally, and to make matters worse - as soon as I got my students behavior under control, I slipped into an absurd cycle of complacency, which kept me from seeking out the help I needed with content. I confidently strode into class each day, teaching 45 minute lessons on standards like "alliteration" in which students would spend the majority of the period practicing tongue twisters, or - my favorite - a prediction lesson in which I brought in a crystal ball and a potentially racist fortune teller outfit for kids to try on as they guessed what would happen next in a fairy tale. All of these lessons would end abruptly with 30 minutes left in the class period for students to wander off to places in the room to read "independently while they practice the objective" (don't ask me how students "practiced" these alliteration skills as they read 100 different independent reading books).
Writing was no easier and no less deceiving as I had children crank out page after page of nonsense, and very little direction other than a very prescribed format to which they were meant to adhere.
And yet - at the end of 9 months of instruction, the results from the New York State ELA exam came back and my students had made AYP (adequate yearly progress) and more on the whole indicating that I had done at least some small part to close the literacy gap for my students. Yes, in spite of the garbage lessons my students waded through for approximately 45 minutes each day, they still made more than a year's worth of progress in reading and writing. How, you ask? We'll get to that a little bit later...
For the next four years following my Teach for America commitment, I had the invaluable opportunity to teach at some of the best charter schools in the country - Democracy Prep Public Schools and Uncommon Schools Inc., learned a lot, and as a result have become a pretty decent literacy teacher. I've benefited from the collective wisdom of two extraordinarily successful charter schools, who have in essence erased the achievement gap for the students at their schools, Teach for America, and the newly emerged Relay Graduate School of Education.
And yet, though my results increased each year - they never spiked. Something I was doing in my first year of teaching, long before I acquired the skills to be a great teacher, was sufficient to close the gap for my kids, albeit not as dramatically I would later.
In the endless cliches of analogies related to pedagogy (make things sticky anyone?), one that becomes increasingly meaningful each time I encounter it is the comparison of learning to read and write to the act of training for and running a marathon. Around January of my first year of teaching - in anticipation for the rapidly approaching ELA test, I realized in a panic that my kids - who would buck if I sat them down to read for more than 10-15 minutes at a time were about to endure a grueling three day endurance event in which they would be expected to read for at lest an hour each day. In preparation for this day, we began the "reading olympics" in my classroom, a daily event in which we independently read in class each day and increased the time spent reading by approximately five minutes each day. I would argue that it was the training for this "endurance event" that sparked what my children needed in order to achieve dramatic reading growth for the year.
There are two paradoxical trains of thought on literacy instruction out there, and spoiler alert - they're both correct.
And they're right to do that - any trainer will tell you that your legs are your largest and most complex muscle group. There are literally countless exercises one could do to improve any one aspect of your running (endurance, stride length, hill performance, etc.).
And yet - every trainer would be wrong, because although it doesn't match your leg muscles in size, your brain is infinitely more complex, and much more of a mystery to those who study it specifically. Just in the realm of literacy itself, there is decoding, fluency, vocabulary, encoding spelling patterns - the list goes on and on - to contend with, and there are likely 15 times as many books for any one of these subsets of literacy instruction with many different opinions on the best mode of instruction.
Most schools devote an average of 75 minutes per day to literacy instruction, and it would be nearly impossible to work through all of the different components of a child's literacy development needs in that time - and that's assuming we know how to spend our time.
And yet, the other half of this paradox is equally true:
Why hadn't I seen results? Did I have a terrible trainer? As much as I'd like to blame my personal trainer, in all likelihood it was my fault. My diet stayed about the same as it had before, and the only time I spent in the gym was the 2 times per week that I spent with my trainer each week and for the most part this time was spent learning the new exercises, with minimal amounts of time spent working out. I'd failed to achieve results not because I had a bad teacher, but because I wasn't spending much time at all working towards achieving them.
In the same way, my first year of teaching was not effective because I was a great trainer with the knowledge of the intricacies of literacy instruction necessary to make my students succeed, but because my students practiced reading and writing every single day - with increasing duration leading up to their big "race." So as complex as teaching reading is, it is also simple: if you can facilitate enough authentic practice for them.
Let's take the analogy a little further - a logical action step in training for a big race would be to attend a seminar on training lead by a master athlete. The knowledge you would learn at such a seminar could be applied to your daily training program and you would very likely see dramatic results. But you wouldn't argue that by spending a majority of your time at these seminars, say 3-4 times per week would have much of an added impact. Nor would you argue that these seminars would be sufficient for increasing your distance or decreasing your time.
The instruction as a teacher you can provide in the classroom is invaluable, even more so if you're an effective coach who can lead students through these exercises. But at the end of the day, students need to get out on the proverbial rode and hit the pages.
The inspiration for this blog is the many classrooms I've had the opportunity to see over the past seven years - teachers who understand the tension between these two competing theories, and teachers who don't. Most recently in my work in Miami, I've worked with talented educators and great minds on the framework of litearcy, but I've also seen classic pitfalls as very well-intentioned educators lose sight of the greater litearcy framework:
The
However, one would cry absurdity if they were told to focus primarily on these muscles in isolation rather than developing muscle groups (it would also lead to a pretty funny looking body).
The same is true of literacy instruction. Yes, you need to work skills in isolation from time to time (teaching students explicitly how to analyze word and phrase relationships), but more important is the "muscle group" of understanding how words and phrases work together to construct a greater meaning. The vast majority of classrooms I visit these days focus nearly 100% of their time doing isolation exercises on one particular "muscle."
Again, skills are important, and as attractive as a bulging bicep is, you're never going to get there without the complementary tricep muscle and more importantly, the major muscle groups.
In reading, these major muscle groups are decoding, fluency, basic comprehension (factual recall), and inferential comprehension. If students are adept at these four major skill components, they'll have little problem picking up on any skill or problem you throw your way, and conversely - until they are, you likely won't have much success developing anything else.
Again - if you've had the unfortunate experience of training improperly at the gym (it should come as no surprise to you that I no longer spend much time there) and tried to take on too much weight to quickly, you either got an immediate jolt of pain in the form of a hernia or been paid a visit the following day by that hash mistress - Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). Conversely, if you're not lifting enough, you may not find yourself in a great deal of discomfort, but you won't see any results either.
The business of finding the right weight to lift - and in reading, the right text with which to develop skills is often overlooked. As champions of rigor, we throw increasingly difficult texts at our children with the most complex analytical questions we can concoct, only to find that children get frustrated.
Dear Abby: It is my hope that this blog will serve not only to identify and help to prevent the pitfalls identified above, but also to contend with the torrents of questions that keep slamming down on our literacy experts.
Each week, I'll be adding new resources, recommended reading, and hopefully some evidence of truly expert teachers in action. I'll also be responding to questions that come my way with this humble teacher's opinions about how to address some of the most frequent dilemmas in teaching reading and writing. For now, comment in the boxes below with your suggestions, pleas for help, for the inaugural weekly postings. I'll work on getting some type of comment board up and running to create more of a forum. I'm fairly illiterate, though, when it comes to all things computer, so if you're interested in helping out, let me know.
Cheers,
T.J.
